Back in February of last year, I made a post about all of the trouble that I had with my Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 graphics card. Since then, I have made three surprising discoveries about the issues that I was having with my graphics card. First, the graphics card was not the cause of the problem. Second, my Cooler Master Extreme Power Plus 500W power supply was a total piece of junk. Third, my 4GB Patriot G2 Series RAM stick turned out to be a dud.
I had my old graphics card replaced a total of three times! After the second replacement, I was beginning to think that series of graphics cards was simply incompatible with my computer’s hardware, since nobody on the internet has ever mentioned having these kinds of issues with that particular card. So, I decided that I would get the card replaced one last time and sell the replacement on eBay. A few weeks later, the graphics card was finally sold and shipped off to the buyer. The buyer quickly received the graphics card and installed it in his computer. He ended up sending an email to my dad, who had taken care of selling the card. In the email, he said that the graphics card worked well and was not having any issues whatsoever. This seemed to confirm my suspicions of the card being incompatible with my computer.
Having sold the old graphics card, I chose to put some of my savings and the money from selling the old card towards a new one. I browsed through the graphics card sections of a few different websites and eventually came across the MSI R9 270 Gaming 2GB graphics card on Amazon.com. I’ve heard plenty of good comments about MSI’s graphics cards in the past, so I decided to buy that graphics card. As usual, it only took a few days to get it delivered. After it was delivered, I installed it in my computer and began testing it. It didn’t show any signs of trouble, so I assumed that the problem had finally been solved. Unfortunately, I was wrong. My new graphics card began to have the same exact issues that my old one had.
I was surprised that I was having issues like this with a completely different graphics card. Wanting some answers, I began digging around on Google. I eventually came across a forum thread where someone was talking about similar issues that he or she was having with a different graphics card. A few people said that the computer’s power supply was likely to be the issue. Sure enough, the original poster found that replacing the power supply with a better one solved the problem. Power supplies aren’t terribly expensive, so I decided to give it a shot. I ended up buying an EVGA NEX-750B power supply. According to reviews, it was a reliable one. Just like the other person, my computer stopped having issues when I installed the power supply. However, the aforementioned solution only worked for a while.
In November of 2014, my computer started acting up again. Games and other graphics intensive programs would make the graphics drivers crash after only a few minutes of operation. By December. the problem had gotten far worse. I had to play my PC games at low resolutions in order to avoid having the drivers crash. CPU intensive tasks, such as video conversions, eventually began causing problems as well. I did some research on Google and found that faulty RAM can cause issues like this. Since Christmas was coming up shortly, I decide to ask for some new RAM for my computer. Just as I had asked, I ended up receiving a pair of G.Skill 8GB Ripjaws Z RAM sticks for Christmas. I quickly installed them in my computer and removed my old 4GB Patriot G2 Series RAM stick. I tried playing a few games and running a few CPU tests, all of which worked without the slightest issues. After over a year of replacing parts and struggling to find the source of the problem, I had finally managed to get my computer to work properly!
I am proud to say that, five months later, my computer is still running smoothly!